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1 1 (August 29, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govemrh0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional_______ R a esearch Service Applying the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to Shared Phones August 29, 2023 The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is one of the primary federal statutes that regulates robocalls made to residential and wireless phones. The Act is enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) but also includes a private right of action, under which individuals may sue telemarketers for certain violations. On June 30, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided Hall v. Smosh Dot Com, Inc., a case that addresses which individuals may sue when the person who subscribes to the phone at issue is not the phone's primary user. The plaintiff in Hall is a mother who purchased a cell phone, placed the phone's number on the national do-not-call registry, allowed her thirteen-year-old son to use the phone, and then filed a lawsuit alleging that a business sent unsolicited text messages to the phone. The Ninth Circuit held that the mother-as the phone's owner and subscriber-alleged a concrete injury from receipt of the unwanted messages and therefore had standing to sue. The court made clear, however, that deciding the standing question did not resolve the merits of the TCPA claim. That merits analysis could, according to the court, raise questions about the scope of liability under the TCPA's private right of action. This Legal Sidebar summarizes some of those questions, which may be of interest to Congress. The TCPA and the National Do-Not-Call Registry Section 227(c) of the TCPA directs the FCC to prescribe rules that protect residential telephone subscribers' privacy rights to avoid receiving telephone solicitations to which they object. The FCC's implementing regulations allow a subscriber to register his or her telephone number on the national do- not-call registry. If an individual registers a number on the national do-not-call registry but then receives multiple unsolicited telephone calls from the same entity during a twelve-month period, Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA provides a right to sue. The FCC has construed the term calls for these purposes to encompass both voice calls and text calls to wireless numbers. In Hall, the plaintiff brought a claim under Section 227(c), alleging that the text messages described in her complaint violated the TCPA and its implementing regulations. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11029 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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